Washington: Fat City

WASHINGTON

The trouble with journalistic clichés is that they go out of fashion before they stop being true. There is no longer much news, for example, in the notion that Washington, the once humble capital of the Republic, has come to resemble a seat of empire in the wealth and privilege of its inhabitants. The story has been done to death over the last few years. But, familiar as it is, few things in Washington are more impressive than its prodigious prosperity.

Washington has never had the filthyrich crowd of New York or Beverly Hills, but its vast professional class has given the area the highest average income in the nation, even when all the poor blacks of the city are taken into account. Half of this professional class is made up of lawyers, journalists, and consultants; the other half, of government executives whose salaries have risen dramatically in the last ten years. (There are now 7000 “supergrades” in Washington, civil servants and “executive level” employees who make from $44,756 to $57,500 per year.) Between them, they support scores of expensive and always jammed restaurants, with a new entry every other week; the nation’s hottest market for Cadillacs and Mercedes; the proliferation throughout the town of big luxurious stores such as Bloomingdale’s and little luxurious stores selling leather and furs; a large servant class from Latin America and the Orient (at the local playground, you see one mother and four Colombian maids); a generation of children in private schools, whose tuition bills lie behind most professional-class complaints about the high cost of living in the nation’s capital; and a real estate market so volatile that he who does not speculate is lost. (One friend helping in the government’s fight against inflation saw inflation earn him a $70,000 profit on real estate transactions within eight months.)

These surroundings have had an equally prodigious effect on the local view of money and life—especially on the notion of what it means to “sacrifice” or “make ends meet.”

The Washington Post recently ran a series about the financial constraints on “two-career” families, in which husband and wife, each holding a professional position, together bring home between $70,000 and $100,000 a year. One couple with a combined income of $80,000 told the Post that “they know it sounds ‘ludicrous, with all the money we make, but we have no margin.’

“[They] acknowledge they have many luxuries. They own a five-bedroom, fully restored 1810 Alexandria town house which they bought for the bargain price of $35,000 in 1970. They also own a cabin in West Virginia which they bought for $11,000 last year and in which they have invested more than $5,000 since. They have taken five European vacations in the past 10 years, at an average cost of $1,500. Their town house is filled with fine antiques— including a 1754 Thomas Finney grandfather clock made in England and a 17th-century wooden wing chair made in Amsterdam. [They] spend about $2,000 a year buying antiques. . .”

“ ‘You don’t feel wealthy when you think of what it costs to live in Washington,’ said [another of the article’s interviewees] Paul Friedman, 35, a lawyer. ‘The costs so far outdistance the value, you don’t feel at the top of the ladder at all.’

“The monthly tab for the Friedmans’ American dream is $2,798. This includes $195 a month for dinner parties and dining out, $660 for the mortgage, and $537 for a tax shelter. It also includes money for vacations. Two years ago the Friedmans went to Kenya, last year to Greece. Each month, after picking up this tab and paying their taxes, they have $702 to bank or to do with as they please.

“ ‘I wouldn’t say we pamper ourselves, but we don’t deny ourselves either,’ Liz Friedman, 30, an administrator for the District of Columbia Bar Association, said. ‘We both work very hard [about 10 hours a day] and we give ourselves little presents.’ ”

The note of discreet self-pity (shared, as far as I could tell, by the Post’s reporter, who seemed to empathize with the couples’ plight) is the key to the culture of the capital. Families like these earn more than do 99 percent of all the other families in the nation, but they are not that much richer than everyone else they know. When the sense of self-restraint on $80,000 is the norm for your friends in professionalclass Washington, it’s only a short step to the conclusion that it is the norm, period.

Such a conclusion lurked offstage during the Senate’s recent debate on the earnings of its members. Each of them receives a salary of $57,500 and, under the old rules, could earn 15 percent more (for a total of $66,125) from speeches and other outside activities. En route to raising the outside-earnings limit to $25,000 (for a total of $82,500), the senators did their best to avoid the question of need, concentrating instead on such issues as fairness (rich senators can receive as many dividends, royalties, and interest payments as they want, since there is no limit on unearned income) and the evil of government intrusion on individual freedoms (an abhorrence the Senate managed to overcome when placing strict limits on the outside earnings of civil servants and military officers), but need was plainly what it was all about.

One of my friends with connections in the Senate went around town asking why senators should be confined to the “average income,” a sum about one quarter as large as the figures under discussion. The New Republic praised Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a “harsh truth-teller,” which he has been on other occasions, for pointing out that “$66,000 is not exactly a princely income if you have a large family, must maintain two homes, and were accustomed to higher incomes before being elected to public office.” No doubt a senator’s overhead is high, especially when college tuition enters the picture. No doubt, too, most of them are worth the money, for as a group they are among the top one percent in energy expended as well as income received. But the near-unanimous verdict of respectable Washington that $66,000 is not much money suggests a certain unmooring from the realities of others’ lives. Those fighting inflation see inflation putting them ahead in the real estate game; those making economic policy for the nation can barely find $500 in each month’s budget for the tax shelter or the second house. Those charged with exercising restraint over public spending live in a world whose restraints are theoretical rather than personal and real. Mao’s rustication program for Chinese bureaucrats may have gotten out of hand, but if Peking was anything like Washington, the emotion behind it is easy to understand.

As the government cracks down on The Progressive for its make-anH-bomb story, how long can The Washington Dossier remain unmolested? Of all our periodical publications, it presents the greatest threat to public order, for the day an outraged citizenry sacks the nation’s capital will be the day the Dossier is distributed outside Washington.

The Dossier is a snob-and-gossip glossy delivered free to homes in the better part of town and available to everyone else for $12 a year. Each month’s issue depicts the elected and appointed tribunes of the people at an endless whirl of galas and receptions, the men in dinner jackets and the women in evening gowns, provender from foreign governments or private corporations laid before them on banquet tables. The general effect is that of an in-house newsletter during the palmy days at Versailles; to read Dossier is to imagine that a career in government consists of selling your house at a profit (the hard-news core of the magazine is its list of “upper-bracket” real estate transactions) and having a Frenchman or an Arab fill your glass with champagne.

One of Dossier’s favorite subjects, until he fled the country after the revolution in Iran, was Ardeshir Zahedi, the shah’s ambassador to the United States. Zahedi’s parties and receptions were among the most lavish in town; they were designed to cement the friendship of the Iranian and American peoples, as his small, tasteful gifts of caviar and champagne cemented the bonds of respect and affection between Zahedi and a number of journalists, congressmen, and government officials. When Zahedi was turned out of his embassy, he left some of his gift lists behind, but names were discreetly omitted in the local press.

“I have had caviar for many years, but I suppose one hundred reporters in town received it too,” columnist Rowland Evans told Claudia Wright of The New Statesman when she discovered that his name was on one of Zahedi’s caviar lists. (Other journalists on the list, according to Wright, were Joseph Kraft, Evans’s partner Robert Novak, Nancy Collins, formerly of the Washington Post, Joseph Alsop, Carl Rowan, and Betty Beale and Joy Billington of the Washington Star. Kraft denied receiving any gifts, Beale admitted it, and the rest declined comment.) Wright continued, “Later in the conversation Evans corrected himself: ‘Probably three hundred reporters in Washington.’ ” That the gifts were caviar instead of coarser fare confirms Zahedi’s insight into the self-esteem and standards of the town.

In bidding Zahedi farewell, Dossier wore its heart on its sleeve, and demonstrated a fundamental but unspoken credo of local life—that a dash of affected decadence is necessary to mask the odor of the real thing.

“Ardeshir Zahedi’s passing from the Washington scene is rippling the waters of Embassy Row and the Washington party circuit . . . Ardeshir’s standard of style and panache encouraged emulation ... It wasn’t all spangles and empty glitter, even though Iran was crumbling behind the facade . . . The social mix was exciting and ebullient, the conversation artful, important and sometimes cunning but always interesting. A momentary pall has descended on the party circuit, complicated by opposition to the Israel-Egyptian treaty signing by Arab governments, whose exceptional hospitality has been considerably curtailed in past months . . . But there are hopeful signs as caterers line up canapes and fire up their ovens for the next round.”

-JAMES FALLOWS